WAS ANYONE HARMED AT LOVE CANAL?

Not long ago at a conference for science writers, a distinguished
health reporter from the WASHINGTON POST stood at the podium and
told the audience, "The weight of the evidence showed no effects
at Love Canal." No one in the audience raised a hand to say,
"Wait a minute--what about the published studies that showed
health damage to the children?" The audience accepted without
question the claim that no one had been harmed at Love Canal.

Evidently none of the 100 scientists and journalists in the
room--including the gentleman at the podium--knew about any of
the five separate studies, two of them by the New York Department
of Health[1,2] and three by independent scientists,[3,4,5]
showing that children at Love Canal suffered an excessive number
of major and minor birth defects, chronic illnesses, and stunted
growth. It was a shocking revelation of ignorance among science
writers and scientists, and an impressive demonstration of how
easily we ignore history.

Love Canal is a trench in the ground nearly two miles long, named
for William Love who began digging in 1896. He hoped to carry
barge traffic from the upper to the lower Niagara River,
providing a way for ships to bypass Niagara Falls. For various
reasons, Mr. Love's canal was never completed. Starting in 1942,
the canal was filled with nearly 21,000 tons (42 million pounds)
of benzene, toluene, chloroform, trichloroethylene,
tetrachloroethylene, hexane, xylenes and leftovers from the
manufacture of pesticides, such as hexachlorocyclohexane
(Lindane) and hexachlorocyclopentadiene (used in the manufacture
of Mirex and Kepone). As of 1980, U.S. government scientists had
identified 248 individual chemicals in the Love Canal dump--a
typical stew of refined petroleum products and chlorinated
hydrocarbons.

In 1953, when the canal couldn't hold any more toxic waste, dirt
was piled over it, and the land was sold to the local government
for $1.00. The local government then built a school on top of the
dump.

By 1977 chemicals could be detected in neighborhood creeks, sewer
lines, and soil, in sump pumps in the basements of homes, and in
the indoor air of those same homes. Chemicals had moved through
the soil and seeped through basement walls. Pesticide residues
bubbled up on the school playground.

It wasn't the health department that discovered the problem. It
was young mothers talking to other young mothers about
miscarriages, still births, and birth defects in their babies.
One young woman named Lois Gibbs watched her children come down
with one illness after another--rashes, serious breathing
difficulties, near-fatal blood disorders. She screwed up her
courage and started knocking on her neighbors' doors, asking if
anything similar was happening in their families. An informal
tally showed roughly half the babies born in homes near Love
Canal during a 2-year period were born with birth defects. This
finally got the state health department's attention and in 1978
the department published its first study[1] showing an unusually
high number of miscarriages among Love Canal women. New York
state then began to evacuate 325 families.

Subsequently state health department researchers Nicholas Vianna
and Adele Polan[2] studied families living along areas called
swales--natural depressions in the ground that tended to carry
more water than average and thus provided pathways for chemicals
seeping away from the toxic canal. They examined birth weights of
infants born to families along the swales during 1940-1978. They
found a significant excess of low-birth-weight babies born during
the time when dumping was occurring (1940-1953). No such excess
was evident for later years.

Low birth weight is not a trivial matter. Low weight at birth is
associated with a lifetime of other problems--chronic diseases
and learning disabilities. Lynn R. Goldman[4] studied a larger
population--all the residents of single-family homes in the
entire Love Canal neighborhood, an area three times as large as
that studied by Vianna and Polan. They found an excess of
low-birth-weight babies born during the period 1963-1980, with a
prevalence of 16 percent low birth-weight along the swales and 10
percent in the non-swale areas, compared to 4.8% in a control
area further away.

Beverly Paigen and others conducted a general health survey with
interviewers inquiring about physician-diagnosed complaints of
the parents of 523 Love Canal and 440 control children. They
found a significant excess of seizures, learning disabilities,
hyperactivity, eye irritation, skin rashes, abdominal pain, and
incontinence in Love Canal children.[5] (See RHWN
#104.)

The same researchers measured factors related to physical growth
of 493 Love Canal children and 428 control children using
technicians (who were unaware of the children's place of
residence) to conduct the measurements.[3] Of the Love Canal
children, the 172 who were born there and had spent at least 75%
of their lives there were significantly shorter for their age
than were the control children. Female children from Love Canal
began to menstruate an average of 8 months later than the control
children, though this difference was not statistically
significant (meaning, it could be due to chance variation). The
physical differences could not be explained by chronic illnesses,
race, height of parents, socioeconomic status, nutrition, stress,
or birth weight. Because children who were born at Love Canal and
lived there longer had a more pronounced reduction in their
growth (compared to children who lived there less time), which
scientists would term a "dose-response relationship," the
researchers concluded that exposure to chemicals was the most
likely cause of the growth retardation.

Taken together, these studies leave little doubt that living near
Love Canal had negative effects on reproduction, development,
growth and health of children.[6] Researchers from the National
Academy of Sciences recently reviewed these studies and validated
their conclusions.[7]

Studies of a population of wild rodents at Love Canal[8] also
revealed significant effects on growth and longevity. Rowley and
others studied the natural population of voles in area I
immediately adjacent to the dump, in area II close to the dump,
and area III about one kilometer (0.6 miles) away. Voles are
small mouse-like mammals. The average life expectancy after
weaning for voles in areas I and II was 23.6 and 29.2 days,
respectively, compared to 48.8 days for the control animals in
area III. Liver and adrenal gland weights among female voles, and
seminal vesicle weights in males, were significantly reduced in
area I compared to area III. Chlorinated hydrocarbons such as
hexachlorocyclohexane were measurable in voles from area I and II
but not from Area III.

The 42 million pounds of chemicals have never been removed from
Love Canal. Instead, a clay "cap" was placed over the dump to try
to keep rain out, to reduce the tendency for the chemicals to
move through the soil. Surface soils were scraped away and placed
in another "capped" chemical dump. Now Governor Mario Cuomo has
given his personal approval to a plan to move poor families back
into homes near Love Canal. Evidently, the purpose of the plan is
to broadcast a message across America, a message developed by the
chemical industry and sanctioned by leading politicians of both
parties: "Love Canal is safe even though it was never cleaned up.
Chemical dumps are something our children can live with." If the
evident ignorance of science writers and scientists is any
indication, the plan is working.
--Peter Montague, Ph.D.